TD Cowen: Tokenized Stocks Will See Little Demand — SkimNews
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- TD Cowen expects "limited near-term adoption among both domestic retail investors and institutions" of tokenized stocks, per VP Reid Noch's Friday paper, citing efficient existing U.S. equity access and weak liquidity in AMM pools
- SEC's Innovation Exemption creates a five-year framework letting tokenized securities venues operate AMM pools without registering as exchanges, and lets certain liquidity providers skip dealer registration — issued days after the Clarity Act failed to advance
- TD Cowen's conversations with issuers found "minimal interest" in tokenizing stocks outside crypto-adjacent firms, with Figure cited as a rare exception
- Figure's dual-listed structure showed 99.9% of notional trading flowed through Nasdaq-listed FIGR rather than blockchain-native FGRS during the 24-hour window TD examined, despite identical economic and voting rights
- TD Cowen flagged perpetual futures as the larger demand story, noting 96% of Nvidia-related notional volume in a Binance snapshot came from perps versus 4% from spot products
- SEC's framework imposes tight guardrails: tokens must represent NMS stocks preserving dividends, voting, and liquidation rights, third-party tokenizers must give issuers a 30-day objection window, and trading volume is capped
Why it matters: For the platforms — including Coinbase and Robinhood — that just secured runway under the SEC's exemption, TD Cowen's analysis reframes the bottleneck as issuer and user demand rather than regulation. Figure's 99.9% traditional-share trading share even with a live blockchain twin, plus 96% of Nvidia-related Binance activity running through perps, suggests tokenized equities compete for a niche already dominated by leveraged derivatives rather than by NYSE/Nasdaq flow.
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